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Witchcraft: A Very Short Introduction (Review)

As someone who reads my fair share of
Oxford’s Very Short Introduction series, I believe I am able to tell the good
from the bad. Since I just finished Malcolm Gaskill’s own contribution to the
series, I knew that it was that time of the year where I review it. Since at
this point I am growing mildly weary of reviewing these books, since they are
so difficult to quantify, before I even picked up Gaskill’s text, I was already
unsure on how I would go about in reviewing it. Thankfully, by the time I finished
the book, this concern had vanished.

Why
it vanished is simple—because Gaskill’s little introduction was superb.

In
under one-hundred-thirty pages, Gaskill throws the reader into what the basic
of idea of witchcraft, its historical situation (how it manifested and
evolved), and how it both appealed to the common peasant as well as the lordly,
all while navigating the elaborate social-web which witchcraft fond itself enamored.
Gaskill skillfully delineates between cultural sensitivity while fleshing out the
varying, and often conflicting stances which the legal system held on witches
and witchcraft during the ancient, medieval, early modern, and contemporary
period, often switching between example periods in order to highlight her main
focus without unnecessarily complex prose.

Of
course, it being a Very Short
Introduction, with the emphasis on ‘very,’ he cannot hope to encapsulate
anything other than the most fundamental premise of the study of the history of
witchcraft. Even so, Gaskill manages and his chapters, though short, manage to
convey the fear which witchcraft held within predominately Christian society
(Ch.1), how heresy operated to enforce strict pious codes of conduct, and how
those codes mutated over time, such as the abolishment of the ‘ordeals’ as a presumptuous
test of God (Ch.2), and why people turned to witchcraft in the first place
along with the rationale for witches persecutions (Ch.3). In the second half of
his book, Gaskill then moves on to the debates which attempted to locate
witchcraft within the spiritual spectrum and whether it was at all compatible
with Christly teachings (Ch.4), while swiftly moving on to how the condemnation
of such witches was legally conducted (Ch.5). Finally, he elucidates the
economic and social factors which exacerbated witch-hunts and why the hunts started
in the first place (Ch.6), before detailing the progression of how witch-craft
was gradually de-criminalized (Ch.7); the final chapter, meanwhile, is a
sobering take on witch-craft in popular culture accompanied by a passionate plea
for pluralism and multi-cultural understanding.

I
will not pretend that I have no problems with Gaskill’s text. For instance, his
reliance on Wittgenstein’s analytical philosophy is a strike in my book, as I
am steeped in the continental tradition and not prone to entertain the ideas of
philosophically heretical idealists (to take an overly harsh, mildly sarcastic
tone). Additionally, his lackluster form of progressivism at the end of the
book—where he gives a caution against racist reductionism at ‘Third-World’
witch-hunters while extolling understanding as a bulwark against the repetition
of history—comes off as an overly metaphysical solution to something, religion,
which has a fairly simple solution (atheism, non-organized religion). He does
not brand himself as a materialist, and that is good, because as excellent as
his introduction is, it is indelibly marked by rampant idealism.

Regardless,
Gaskill’s text, politics and philosophy aside, should be the starting point for
anyone intrigued by the study of witches or witchcraft. It provides an
accessible entry point into what has become a pool of discord in the popular
imagination; cutting through the pulp and trash of the witch-y world—both academic
and non-academic—Gaskill presents a dizzying subject in a non-dizzying manner.
With the many texts out there which purport to explain the history of witches,
why settle for something inferior and wordy when you can buy Gaskill’s book on
the cheap and still have one of the best (short) introductions there is to the
topic?

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Lately, I was browsing around online and found another handy resource for aspiring medievalists.

Enter, Western Michigan University's Medieval Institute!

The site has links to an extensive book shop, scholarly journals, as well as a free download. See below for links.

General listing: http://scholarworks.wmich.edu/medievalpress/
Index of titles available for purchase: http://www.wmich.edu/medievalpublications/all-titles
The 'Medieval Globe' book(s): http://scholarworks.wmich.edu/medieval_globe/ (Click on title(s) for free download)

Okay, that is all for now. Sometime soon I think that I would like to organize all of my resource links so that I, as well as you, have a concrete listing of reliable resources. Until then, we shall have to make due.